The appearance of Urban History as a journal marks a further stage in the progression from Newsletter to Yearbook and now to a semi-annual periodical. The timing is apt since it coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the first issue of the Urban History Newsletter, and the enthusiasm surrounding the production and publication of Urban History is a continuing sign of the vigour and confidence expressed by H.J. Dyos thirty years ago, and again in 1974, when the Yearbook first appeared. The current academic self-confidence is matched by a commercial one from the new publishers, Cambridge University Press.

Modern Irish history is urban history. It is a story of the transferral of a populace from rural settlements to small towns and cities; of the discipline and regulation of society through new urban spaces; of the creation of capital through the construction of buildings and the sale of property. The history of Ireland has been overwhelmingly the history of land, but too often the emphasis has been on the field rather than the street, and on the small farmer instead of the urban shopkeeper. But the same questions of property run throughout Irish urban history from the early modern period to the contemporary, as speculators, businesses and government have attempted to convert land into profit, creating new buildings, streets and spaces, and coming into conflict with each other and other vested interests. Indeed, as recent work on Irish cities has shown, a turn to the urban history of Ireland provides a framework and a methodology for writing a textured and complex history of Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity.

The appearance of the Urban History Yearbook marks an important and exciting stage in the development of its subject, not only in this country but wherever it is studied. The study of the urban past is no new thing but what has been so striking about it in the course of the last decade or so has been the almost overwhelming growth in the numbers of scholars taking part in it and the immensely wider range of topics and techniques they have been pursuing.

From the early 1960s until his sudden and unexpected death in August 1978, Jim Dyos was the chief inspiration, proselytizer and ambassador of urban history in Britain. Through many personal contacts and friendships in various parts of the world, he gave to all those connected with his chosen pursuit the sense of belonging to a great international family. It was entirely in keeping with his ambitions that he had been planning a major international conference to chart the progress made since the earlier agenda for urban history was set out at Leicester in 1966, and to highlight those methodological issues which should be confronted if urban historians are to sustain an innovative role into the 1980s. This conference will still take place with the help of a committee which had been working with him, the intention being to publish a volume based on the proceedings as the most fitting tribute to his memory. Nevertheless, it seemed right to begin this issue of the Yearbook with a short appreciation of the way Jim Dyos contributed to the study and enjoyment of urban history through his own teaching, research and writings.

This paper aims to provide a transferable methodology suitable for mapping the spatial development of medieval urban landscapes. Using the technique of ‘plan analysis’ the paper discusses some new evidence relating to the origins and development of Coventry, one of medieval England's more important provincial centres which rose to prominence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The case study provides an opportunity to show how the plan analysis technique works and how it is of benefit to urban historians, as well as archaeologists and geographers.

History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.

Urban history is a rapidly expanding, flourishing field in Europe. Nevertheless, urban scholars would do well to re-examine the paradigms within which they have been working as the field today lacks central questions and general interpretive models. Moreover, the common focus on urban biography or upon one region within a single nation-state has become increasingly outmoded, given the international scale of economic processes and migration flows. More attention to topics treated within a European-wide or even international context is needed. In addition, urban history as currently defined is tilted towards social and economic concerns to the neglect of the political arena.

In investigating urban culture, historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made and the modern, and have paid less attention to the role of nature and the past, which seem the opposite of what the town stands for. This survey, which takes as its case-study England, argues that nature and the past have always been part of urban life, but as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, they became if anything an even more important element in city and town culture.

The problem of social conflict is central to the historiography of nineteenth-century cities. Since Friedrich Engels wrote his powerful indictment of social relations in English industrial towns, urban historians have told and retold tales of dramatic struggles between workers and their middle-class employers. Whether seen from a Marxist or non-Marxist perspective, the standard books on social life in industrial towns abound with strikes, demonstrations, confrontations, and other more subtle signs of conflict. A. Temple Patterson and Malcolm Thomis depict the often tumultuous responses of Leicester and Nottingham framework knitters to their economic decline. Accounts of urban Chartism regularly link workers’ economic and social demands to strong middle-class disapproval and disavowal within a local context. Books on the 1830s and 1840s are particularly rich in incidents of confrontation, but the growing literature on the late nineteenth century also emphasizes this theme. Gareth Stedman Jones places middle-class misconceptions and fears at the centre of his analysis of casual labour in London, and Robert Grey's discussion of Edinburgh artisans assumes the reality of class conflict as a determinant of urban social relations. Nevertheless our understanding of divisions among urban social groups and of the relationships of one group to another remains primitive and unsatisfactory.

Venetian printmakers in the sixteenth century were enthusiastic participants in what became a project of civic self-promotion as they looked beyond the local market to an international one. In response to the fascination of foreigners who marvelled at the city's singular topography and its reputation for liberty and licentiousness, the bird's-eye view and images of local social types – such as the doge and courtesan – became transmuted into icons of the city's urban identity. The medium and modes of representation used to reproduce the republic's social and physical organization on paper are crucial here, for it was the repetition and sedimentation of visual conventions that forged iconicity. Venice was redefined as a centre in which all the world could be seen. And the mechanisms for this redefinition, as this article argues, emerged, in part, out of print, for it was because the city could be seen from the eye of a bird, on paper as an image, by foreigners – that it could be re-envisioned from the outside in.

This paper studies the evolution of urban form in both physical and social manifestations through an examination of the transformation of the Chinese capital from a planned imperial city into a modern metropolis in the early twentieth century. The newly created municipal government sought to modernize Beijing through public works to improve the old urban infrastructure. Consequently, city walls and gates were reconfigured; streets were paved, widened and expanded; and new rules of urban planning and zoning were introduced. Reflecting changes in political power relations, the modernist transformation in the urban built environment was evidently brought about by a combined force of Western influences and Chinese indigenous developments, especially by a shift in ideological allegiance from imperial authority to people's rights, by the state's increasing intervention in urban affairs, and by new technologies transmitted from the West.

Architectural treatises and inscriptional evidence from buildings, artefacts and monuments are used to identify the different terms ascribed to urban settlements in medieval India. These sources reveal the diversity of terms used to describe towns and cities, and accordingly the diversity of functions associated with them. The linguistic variations employed indicate how urban functions changed over time, and convey contemporary perceptions of an urban hierarchy based on a functional classification or typology of towns.

Feminist historians have expended a good deal of energy on delineating the cultural concept of the Two Spheres This curious cultural phenomenon emerged in the wake of the evangelical revival and the Industrial Revolution, and caused people to believe that the world was divided into two to match the two sexes. The male part was the world of public affairs, commerce, business and, of course, the defence of the realm. The female centred on the private domain: home, family and children. The problem that this imposed on women has never yet been successfully resolved: the sexual division of labour and the domestic location of women's work. In Britain in the nineteenth century, as the population moved into the cities and standards of living rose (if patchily), the physical form of the modern urban environment took shape in ways which perpetuated the continuance of the Two Spheres. This was particularly true for middle-class women, whose lives in suburban retreats had little physical connection with the rest of the city. Of all the pressures which dictated the form of nineteenth-century cities, there was not one related to finding new ways for women to live in modern cities outside a rigid interpretation of the Two Spheres.

The vast transformations that shaped western cities at the turn of the twentieth century were the product of global processes and interactions. Drawing on the cases of Montreal and Brussels, this article argues that underlying these broad dynamics were questions and preoccupations pertaining to more localized and personal scales of the body and the home. Concentrating on the discourses that circulated in these distinct, yet analogous cities, the article shifts the focus of the transnational approach from specific contacts between individuals and places, to the wider web on which circulated the ideas and initiatives that reshaped people's living environment.

As part of the reconstruction of their built environments at the beginning of the twentieth century, London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago confronted the question of whether to provide public toilets. In comparing the arguments and decisions over this question, this article demonstrates how the male leadership of each city sought to preserve the centuries-old patriarchal tradition of separate public and private spheres and limit women's access to public spaces. It also reveals the gendered dimension of ideas and experiences of the city that underlay the rhetoric surrounding this question.

A small group of urban historians met informally at the annual conference of the Economic History Society in 1962. In 1963, H.J. (Jim) Dyos, very much in charge of the enterprise, began circulating a subscription newsletter. The early issues of the Urban History Newsletter (the ancestor of this journal) reveal the slow and hesitant way in which the Urban History Group formed, growing rapidly in membership but reluctant to develop into a formal society and determined against the establishment of a conventional journal. There were after-dinner talks in 1966 and 1967 but only in April 1968 was a full-day meeting established in a pattern still followed 40 years on. This light-hearted account is based on Dyos' ‘editorials’ in the Newsletter and personal memories of the man himself.

The concept of civil society provides a useful means of evaluating the social and political relationships of British towns. Civil society refers to the non-prescriptive relationships that lie between the state and kin. Such relationships are associated with the existence of the free market, the rule of law and a strong voluntary associational culture. Both theoretical analysis and historical evidence link civil society with the nature of urban places, their complexity, their function as a central place and their operation as a focus for flows of information. Between 1780 and 1820 the agencies of civil society in Britain provided an arena for making choices, for reasoned informed debate and for the collective provision and consumption of services in an open and pluralist manner.

The history of suburbs has received so much scholarly attention in recent decades that it is time to take stock of what has been established, in order to discern aspects of suburbs that are still unknown. To date, the main lines of inquiry have been dedicated to the origins, growth, diverse typologies, culture and politics of suburbs, as well as to newer topics such as the gendered nature of suburban space. The vast majority of these studies have been about particular times and places. The authors propose a new perspective on the study of suburbs, one which will begin to investigate the transformations of suburbs after they have been established. Taking the entire era from the mid-nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century as a whole, it is argued that suburbs should be subjected to a longitudinal analysis, examining their development in the context of metropolises that usually enveloped them within a generation or two of their founding. It is proposed that investigation of these ‘transitions’ should be undertaken in parallel with the changes that occur in the life-cycles of their residents. It is suggested that an exploration of the interaction of these factors will open a broad new research agenda for suburban history as a subfield of urban history.

The long hold of the idea that ‘India is the land of villages’ on the imaginations of politicians, policy makers and scholars alike was a result not just of the numerical preponderance of the village, but because it represented the space of an organic, unsullied authenticity. Needless to say, in many accounts, well into the late twentieth century, the authenticity was only made possible by relinquishing a claim to the turbulence of history, and indeed on ‘modernity’ itself. The Indian city in the period of colonial rule, on the contrary, became a heaving, undisciplined monster, the site of a corrupting modernity, illegitimate and even unauthentic in its form. Apart from the monumental cities of Delhi or Lucknow, and some attention to ‘temple’ towns, most monographs on modern Indian cities written in the last 60 years remained without a legible past and were the work largely of geographers or sociologists. Those early pioneers who explored the history of the modern Indian city on its own terms, such as Narayani Gupta, Mariam Dossal or Veena Oldenburg, were lonely outcrops in a vast field of historical works that were largely rooted in the countryside. The peasant and the village, rather than the worker and the city, occupied centre-stage in the most important phases of post-independence Indian historiography. Since the history of Indian nationalism gripped the scholars of the immediate post-independence years, and economic history powered by Marxism informed the next phase of writing (both of which were enormously productive lines of enquiry), the Indian city was embedded in works that traced either the fate of anti-colonial nationalism or the broader trajectories of labour and capital. The innovative approaches of the Subaltern Studies collective from the early 1980s drew historiographic attention once more to the rebellious peasant and rural communities or mentalities.

A new opportunity, and a new challenge, presents itself to urban historians. In order to obtain a deeper understanding of historical urban space and spatial relationships, the contributors to this Special Issue deploy new techniques of spatial analysis using mapping tools to explore the density, frequency and proximity of various features of towns and cities. The contributors focus on case-studies at various urban scales – from major commercial centres (New York, Rome, Paris and London) – to smaller towns in the urban hierarchy. They also range across the tenth to the twentieth centuries and so challenge a common assumption that mapping the town is essentially an approach best suited to the modern period. Individually and collectively, the authors demonstrate how the urban morphology of the city developed and how durable that spatial patterning can be.